The Zuckerberg Files: an extensive analysis of everything Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly in his capacity as Facebook’s founder and CEO.
Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

Over drinks at a conference in Gothenburg in 2010, our small group of privacy academics were discussing the idea that we had so little access into Zuckerberg’s life and ideas compared to the access he had into everyone else’s.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” we thought as we sipped cheap Scandinavian beers, “if we could reverse-Facebook Facebook? If we had a record of everything Zuckerberg has ever said?”

And so Michael Zimmer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spent the next three years working with research assistants to compile The Zuckerberg Files, an extensive analysis of everything Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly in his capacity as Facebook’s founder and CEO.

I’ve been working with Zimmer and University of Maryland postdoctoral scholar Nicholas Proferes to organize, code, and produce an initial analysis of what we have called the archive, which was published in July 2016.

Zuckerberg’s use of language invites interesting questions about the relationship between tech luminaries, their products, and – most importantly – the world they are trying to create. These public statements are purposeful and strategic, Proferes told me, and the language used by these influential creators of technology has an impact on how we understand that technology.

‘I can do [a face book] better than they can. And I can do it in a week’

Zuckerberg, as Zimmer has pointed out, is arguably synonymous with Facebook in a way no other individual has been with a company since Steve Jobs and Apple. But what exactly does Zuckerberg talk about? What does his choice of language say about his plans, about Facebook’s way of operating, and about what kind of impact it is having on the world?

The best known Zuckerberg is probably the brash barely twentysomething, as caricatured in the Aaron Sorkin film the Social Network. In 2004, this Zuckerberg declared in the pages of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper that he thought it was ridiculous that it might take the university years to build an online directory of student information akin to the printed “face books” that were already in use. “I can do it better than they can,” he declared. “And I can do it in a week.”

When Mark Zuckerberg first started working on what would become Facebook in 2004, he mocked Harvard’s attempt to create an online directory of students. ‘I can do it better than they can. And I can do it in a week.’ Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer

But there’s also a casual side to the CEO that gets squeezed out by this rather convenient tech pastiche. Though our research focused primarily on public appearances, interviews and official statements, the archive also contains some of his publicly available Facebook posts. These are notable mainly for the banality one would expect from a white guy in his 20s, like his mild obsession with comedian Andy Samberg. Zuckerberg posted about him numerous times at the height of his popularity on Saturday Night Live. The bromance culminated in Samberg impersonating Zuckerberg at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in 2011 nine months after Zuckerberg’s “awkberg” SNL appearance alongside Samberg and Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who played Zuck in the Social Network movie.

Digging through Zuckerberg’s old Facebook posts offers insight into both the man and the site. There are both bold declarations of personal taste (4 April 2009: “Dominoes is not that fun of a game”) and major site milestones (5 September 2004: “And then there were wall posts”).

‘An open and connected world’

As both Zuckerberg and Facebook matured, however, the two become increasingly intertwined, even in his personal updates. In August 2012 he broadcast his grilling habits to the world: “I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome. I’m making a Fred’s steak”. Even grilling meat, it seems, is an opportunity to tout an “open and connected world”.

Facebook’s “open and connected” mantra was first codified in the company’s mission statement in 2008, and Zuckerberg has woven it into his public statements ever since. It’s in everything he talks about, from working out and announcing the company’s IPO to his wife’s pregnancy and even the discussion of the murder of Philando Castile (a video of the aftermath of Castile’s murder at the hands of Minnesota police officers in July 2016 has been viewed more than 4.5m times).

“Open and connected” marks a significant shift in the company’s ambitions. Zuckerberg’s earliest interviews had stressed that Facebook was merely a tool for helping people quickly find information about those around them; in 2005 he defined the site as “a utility ... something that people use in their daily lives to look people up and find information about people”.

But by 2010, the “open and connected” mission had fully taken hold, and something of a revisionist history of Facebook emerges in Zuckerberg’s language. He began to describe how Facebook had always been “focused on achieving [the company’s] mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected”.

Zuckerberg with wife Priscilla Chan and daughter Max. Describing his ‘open and connected’ vision is a common theme for the CEO, who also used the phrase when announcing his wife’s pregnancy.
Photograph: Uncredited/AP

It also represents a kind of moral shift for the company, moving away from a simple search to one with an implicitly social and political mission. An open and connected world is more than just a world where people can share and connect with one another – it’s also a better world, and one that empathises. “Just a lot of kind of good human things that make society function better,” Zuckerberg said in 2010.

The sentiment is also prevalent in the (many) apologies Zuckerberg has issued in response to site redesigns or company overreach over the years. In 2006, before the “open and connected” mantra had fully crystalized, Zuckerberg – in an apparent fit of condescension – implored users to “calm down” and “breathe” when the introduction of the NewsFeed upended established information flows on the site.

The CEO justified the feature by arguing that “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends”. Finally succumbing to user complaints (and pressure from regulators) over labyrinthine privacy tools in 2010, Zuckerberg sort-of apologized and promised to do better on privacy while continuing to make the world – you guessed it – “more open and connected”. Whether Facebook really is making the world more open and connected – or actually building a proprietary network that discouragers users from leaving for the rest of internet – is another question.

‘It allows people to stay connected … who aren’t necessarily comfortable picking up the phone’

Zuckerberg’s commitment to “openness” – along with his shifting descriptions of the site he founded – give the impression that Facebook is a Swiss army knife of social good. He paints it as a service that makes small social interactions easier (“What I think it allows is for people to stay connected … who aren’t necessarily comfortable picking up the phone and calling each other or arranging time to hang out and go for coffee”) and at the same time provides a backbone for democratic engagement (“We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people”).

The openness Facebook affords “fundamentally affects a lot of the core institutions in society – the media, the economy, how people relate to the government and just their leadership”.

His vision of the world does seem to be completely sincere. This is not simply a branding exercise, but an expression of a worldview and ambition for his business that he deeply believes. “I’m just really lucky,” he said on the occasion of Facebook’s 10th birthday. “I really feel this deep responsibility, and I try to help folks here feel how unique of a position we’re in, and that we need to do the best that we can.”

But this sincerity also appears to be underpinned by a social and economic conservatism, if one dressed in the progressive language of openness and transparency. He wants more and better versions of what he already sees around him – and he wants Facebook to be fundamental in supporting or delivering that kind of innovation.

Zuckerberg meets Jesse Eisenberg, who played him in the film the Social Network, on SNL.

At times, Zuckerberg seems almost cognizant of this disconnect, though he’s quick to explain it away: “Earlier on I just, like, really didn’t think Facebook was going to be a business. I didn’t care about starting it as a business … Now I guess my attitude is that I think that building a company is one of the most efficient ways in the world that you can kind of align the incentives of a lot of smart people towards making a change.”

‘They are keeping up with friends and family, but they’re also building an image and a brand’

While Facebook’s mode of Silicon Valley-style progress might “disrupt” traditional or established industries and service providers, it does not ultimately disrupt the social or economic structures upon which they rely.

As critical scholars of social media have long pointed out, this focus on innovation and broad social missions actually works to cover up or mask sites’ commercial motives. As internet and communications scholar Nicholas John has argued, when companies such as Facebook characterize the transfer of data to advertisers as a positive kind of “sharing”, they simultaneously mask and “mystify relationships that are in fact purely commercial”.

This is important as it can keep users from fully understanding how their data is being collected and exploited for economic gain – and how companies such as Facebook don’t actually open but, instead, monopolize the web.

Sometimes this tension between commercial interest and social progress becomes obvious. As the site began to more readily accommodate businesses, brands and celebrities as active participants as well as potential advertisers, Zuckerberg and company had to reconcile the presence of these new commercial actors (and new tools like Pages and profiles for public figures) with the existing social fabric of the site.

Yet rather than carve out a vision for commercial users that was different or distinct from everyday individual users, Zuckerberg recast all users in economic and self-interested terms.

“Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand … If you carry that thinking over from people to things like stores and brands you realize that everyone’s trying to do the same thing.”

At best, the end result of this flattening of commercial and individual users is – as Facebook has recently learned – a site that encourages the sharing and exchange of commercial and media content but not necessarily meaningful personal information. At worst, it reduces the individuality and uniqueness of each of us – a friend, family member, citizen or human – to be valued only as a consumer, a corporate commodity.

Openness and connectedness, therefore, are not value-neutral propositions. The benefits and burdens of an open and connected world are not evenly distributed (a point perhaps best made by Safiya Noble and her work on the trauma and exploitation of violence against black bodies through online video). And Zuckerberg appears to be either blind to this reality or simply OK with a certain level of social and cultural collateral damage in pursuit of his open and connected technological vision.